WOW!!! Great job!! I love it. Very nice layout and the color scheme works perfectly! I have to say even the picture fits in nicely (all be it a bit corny). It did however take a few momments to load, perhaps because it is comming all the way from convict land j/p

musik

Legend

Posts: 6893

Loc: up a tree

3+ Months Ago

haha ya cheeky bugger!!

I like the style also - I hope it didnt take too long to load tho. I made all the images gif's so they would be smaller.

Thanks

b_heyer

Web Master

Posts: 4581

Loc: Maryland

3+ Months Ago

musik wrote:

haha ya cheeky bugger!!

Is that aussie for good lookin'?

musik wrote:

I made all the images gif's so they would be smaller.

Do you use photoshop? Because a lot of images are smaller in jpg format if you 'save for web' and a lot are smaller in gif format, it all depends what kind of picture.

Hrmm I looked over your images and they all seem fairly small, must be the distance between down under and new york.

musik

Legend

Posts: 6893

Loc: up a tree

3+ Months Ago

yeah i used photoshop - i used the save for web "save as HTML" i found it was better quality and smaller files with a gif.

I usually prefer webpages that extend and subtract according to the screen resolution but this one still looks good i think.

So your in NY huh. Whats the weather like? Its just coming into Spring here although you wouldnt know - it bloody rained all weekend!

b_heyer

Web Master

Posts: 4581

Loc: Maryland

3+ Months Ago

I looked around and I don't see any save as HTML option...hrmmm....do you have the original sized picture of that girl? I'd like to see what some of my saved sizes look like.

You did do a pretty good job for a static sized page,

oh and you don't have AOL IM by any chance (bad joke!: Aussie On Line?)?

tierra

Student

Posts: 91

3+ Months Ago

Amazing job, the colors, the layout, the fonts.

It also took a while to load for me also though, but it looks like almost everything except for the paragraph and the copyright is an image... that left menu could be text... I know it looks better as a graphic, but you may want to spare a little on the bandwidth.

I also just wanted to note that I hate Frontpage... overall I'm very impressed it did as good as it did, but there are still little issues that bug me like when it does stuff like this:

yeah i know what you mean - it does spit out a bit of extra HTML although the actual page size is only an average of 20kb each.

So.. now I just ask people to rate the time that it took for the page to fully load -

a) took ages - by now i would have closed it and moved on

b) took a little time but not enough to make me annoyed

c) loaded fine for me

Geekette

Proficient

Posts: 482

Loc: The Land of NeverWinter (FL)

3+ Months Ago

I'd have to rate the loading time at a B. The page looks great, though!

She God

Student

Posts: 72

Loc: California (Land Of The Cackling Sun)

3+ Months Ago

Very nice, has a personal touch that I like. A sort of simplicity I try to do but seem to fail at. *Smiles* I wouldn’t mind seeing a rollover on the top menus just for fun. Although it’ll only add to the loading time you could try to play with it a bit. It’s all so static. Change them to blue when you rollover??

Still, very clean and very pleasant to look at. I like it a lot.

tierra

Student

Posts: 91

3+ Months Ago

I'm a patient person... and it was slow enough that it annoyed me a little, but not enough to say screw it. I saved the page off, and looked at it. It's 140kb. That's heavyweight class for a website... average is usually about 60kb I think, and if you can come up with an awesome site in under 20kb, consider yourself lucky! Anyway, I also wanted to point out that the bulk of the images will be cached in any browser so only the first hit gets the brunt of it. The rest and any new page using the same design should only need maybe 10-20kb.

thanks tierra, do you guys have any suggestions for making the site smaller in size? I know its pretty heavy on the graphics i am not used to making sites this way - so any hints for compressing files further with photoshop would be very helpful!

tierra

Student

Posts: 91

3+ Months Ago

well, photoshop's default quality settings usually aren't the absolute best for compression (after all, a product that creates crap quality images isn't going to sell), but they are set for the most effecient. You could turn down the quality when you "save for web", but your page will still be maybe 100kb at pretty low settings (you don't want to go lower than that). As for other options, like I pointed out about making your second menu in the middle text rather than images. If you don't want to do that, I suggest an image map and save the menu as all one image (that way the browser doesn't have to send out as many requests). The area above the black menu is all one image, but because it's a "scanline" texture, you could crop it to however many pixels wide it is by 2 pixels hieght, then use a table definition to repeat the image in a background. Other than that, it really just has to do with the fact that you used Photoshop for the design, but didn't think about what areas can really just be done with HTML/CSS, and they just have an image instead.

musik

Legend

Posts: 6893

Loc: up a tree

3+ Months Ago

yeah thinking about it now there are a lot of areas I could delete the image and just use the same colour as a background in that particular cell. I will try that and see how low it goes.

I am not sure how to do the image maps you mentioned.

cheers
Rose

tierra

Student

Posts: 91

3+ Months Ago

the image maps wouldn't save you any size (well, maybe now that I think about it, but not much), but it will help it load faster.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=U ... gle+Search

musik

Legend

Posts: 6893

Loc: up a tree

3+ Months Ago

ahahaaa umm

I just realised that yesterday that I gave the wrong info - I made the site in Photoshop 7.0 then I saved it as a .psd and opened it in Ulead Photoimpact 7 - I find the slicing tool much more user friendly than Photoshop.

You can simply click on sliced section and make them links etc. Then you just select Save for Web > Save as HTML - it gives you a whole heap of options to save it as JPG or GIF as well as being able to add a heap of things like Page Title/Author/Decriptions/Add Favourite Icon, backgrounds and much more.

It then produces your image into a ready made HTML file all you have to do is go in and tweak a few things like div align etc.

I use Photoshop mostly - although I find Photoimpact handy for other things that Photoshop doesnt do so easy.

b_heyer

Web Master

Posts: 4581

Loc: Maryland

3+ Months Ago

Ahhh that xplains a lot! One thing on connection speed: Your domain is just as slow, so it isn't you, but the server.

musik

Legend

Posts: 6893

Loc: up a tree

3+ Months Ago

hmm it shouldnt be that slow (the server)

jshen0630

Newbie

Posts: 5

Loc: California, USA

3+ Months Ago

I like the colar and layout.
the 'about us' page can't be found.

ATNO/TW

Super Moderator

Posts: 23458

Loc: Woodbridge VA

3+ Months Ago

Speed seems a little slow, but not unbearable - at least you can see the images loading in IE so at least it's visible what's happening. It varies between 6 secs to 12 secs depending on the size of the page on broadband.

Just out of curiousity I'm wondering if the following meta tag might be dragging down your page load time:

I have no idea what that does, but I'm taking a guess that it's reading that directory and the .ufo file as it's loading the graphics. *shrug -- I'm sure that was generated by PhotoImpact but I'm not sure why it's necessary.

As far as the overall site -- very nice. I might suggest a different color to the Lifestyle and Icon series graphics to make them stand apart from the links a little better.

musik

Legend

Posts: 6893

Loc: up a tree

3+ Months Ago

bugger, i never noticed that!

actually come to think of it, I dont think it actually loads the document, its just a reference.

the_real_tisse

Graduate

Posts: 116

Loc: Belgium

3+ Months Ago

An excellent site there musik!

Clean, slick, to the point and easy to navigate.

Already mentionned, but yes, it does load slow. But, once loaded the navigation is fast so I'm guessing it is all those tap images that makes it slow. Maybe compress them a bit more.

The images should be somewhere, maybe look for them, open them up all seperately and open them in PS, then go to save for web and you can compress them more I believe.

Just a thought, could work.

kind regards
Tisse

musik

Legend

Posts: 6893

Loc: up a tree

3+ Months Ago

ahh yes another great idea, I am writing all these down so I can use them when I get a chance to get back to work on it!

Thanks so much for everyones comments, you guys give great advice!

Nego

Expert

Posts: 697

Loc: Chicago

3+ Months Ago

I gotta say I luv the layout alot! Perfect colors, Very clean layout, and easy navigation, thats a very nice layout.

musik

Legend

Posts: 6893

Loc: up a tree

3+ Months Ago

Thanks Nego!

It will look even better once I implement the changes which have been suggested. I think it will cut down the load time a lot!

I've got about 5 other sites to make for other similar companies, they are coming along well. Some days it feels like so much to do and no time to do it in!

Alan2

Graduate

Posts: 112

3+ Months Ago

Hiya rose,

Took a look at the site, It did take a little while to load (broadband connection).

It looks like the quoted code above came directly from you making the file. eg the computer name and local address. ?

I use a similar type of address to access music on my other computer. (//alan/music/mp3filename.mp3) so it's most likely that it's a local file name generation.

Plus Rose, why not use "Dreamweaver". I know someone who swears by it plus I use it myself it is quite handy and does not make such a mess of the code as Frontpage does.

musik

Legend

Posts: 6893

Loc: up a tree

3+ Months Ago

Hey Alan honey its so good to see you *hugs*

Its just a meta tag that PhotoImpact generates when it creates the website from the slices, nothing to do with Frontpage etc, but got to say I stand by Frontpage, lets put it this way, I have tried Dreamweaver and I just stick with what I know.

I've actually been playing around with some other ways of speeding up the loading time, as seen in this one http://www.ricochet.com.au/reece/ where i have basically sliced out any single colours and replaced them with a small background image which tiles. I think its sped up the loading proccess a lot faster.

Thanks for having another look, and yeah FP is *plum* for overloading with HTML ---- ahh maybe one day I will give in and change